Never a man to aim low, Charles Prestwich Scott set the bar pretty high when he established the credo of the Manchester Guardian as: "honesty, cleanness [integrity], courage, fairness, a sense of duty to the reader and the community."

Those words were set out in a leader written in 1921 to celebrate the centenary of the paper and today their practical expression is held in an annual report published tomorrow entitled Living our Values.

The bar feels even higher now than then, in an industry struggling to cope with falling revenues in the face of recession, and the immense social and cultural change brought about by the web; that medium that brings excitement and peril in equal measures to conventional business models.

Although we sometimes fail, the standards by which the organisation continues to be judged, internally and externally, don't change. We produce this annual independently verified report because it helps remind us that our values can lose their vitality over time unless they are keenly understood, made relevant to current times, and are actively measured and reported on.

The report, which contains a wealth of information about the business, looks at what we mean by sustainability, our environmental impact, how the staff are treated and how we behave within the community in which we work.

Through our editorial coverage and business activities, we hope to demonstrate to readers, staff, advertisers, suppliers and our communities that Guardian News & Media is committed to enhancing society's ability to build a sustainable future.

Our long-term ambition is to be carbon positive – going beyond carbon neutral and positively affecting climate change. We aim to do this by influencing individuals, companies and governments as well as setting challenging targets in operations we directly control.

The strategy is designed so that success in one area of the business spurs innovation in other departments. For example, the editorial reputation we have gained from developing one of the world's leading environment websites has helped to create Guardian Sustainable Business and the Green Ad network, which sells advertisements on behalf of small publishers.

Our journalism, the core of what we do, is a major part of the report. While some media companies are limiting access to their editorial by putting up paywalls on the web, the Guardian is opening itself up even further through a process called mutualisation. This is more natural for the Guardian to do than other media organisations because its roots lie in the reform movement, and therefore it feels more at ease with challenge, dissent and collaboration.

The essential qualities of our journalism stay the same: editorial staff navigating readers and users through the torrent of news, data and comment, and presenting it in a compelling way. But using the web to link reporting and response gives readers the ability to follow conversations, compare multiple sources and links, and get involved. We think this collaborative approach can help us get to the truth of things, faster.

The evidence that it has been a tough year is all there too. The report reveals budgets have been cut by a fifth and staff have been made redundant.

Cost-cutting and redundancies across the business have shaken the culture of GNM. While job losses are difficult in any circumstance, they have been felt more keenly at GNM as its ownership by the Scott Trust has meant the company has in past economic downturns been able largely to avoid job cuts.

Despite this upheaval, the latest employee survey showed there was a widespread acceptance of the need for the company to respond to the difficult economic climate; 86% agreed that restructure and cost-cutting was necessary – £26.2m in 2009-10 – to respond to changes in the media industry.

The survey in the autumn of 2009 showed that nearly three-quarters of staff would recommend GNM as an employer, one of the most important measures of the health of a company. This compares with a standard UK score of 68% in good times. The proportion who would not recommend GNM as an employer doubled, but even now is only 10%. All this and more is there in the report, the full version of which, warts and all, will be published online tomorrow (guardian.co.uk/sustainability).